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Being a Good Neighbor
The “Inside Out” Podcast from Family Life News
Americans feel detached and isolated. Pastor Doug Hankins believes we have a neighborliness problem. On this edition of Inside Out, Hankins talks about Jesus’ call to be good neighbors, the topic of his The Gospel Coalition article “Benefits of Being a Good Neighbor.”
Americans feel detached and isolated. Pastor Doug Hankins believes we’re suffering from a lack of neighborliness, and Christians are just the people to solve it. But it won’t be easy.
“Neighborliness is costly,” Hankins says. “There’s no shortcut around it. Part of the reason neighborliness is like the fifth level blackbelt of being a Christian is because of the difficulty of it.”
Hankins is senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Winter Park, Florida. He authored the Gospel Coalition article “Benefits of Being a Good Neighbor.”
“I think the way Jesus understood being a neighbor was loving the people who are near you. If there are people around you, there is–if you’re a believer in Christ–a responsibility to consider these people as your neighbors and to ask the Lord ‘what must I do to care for them well?’”.
If you are ready follow Jesus into loving your neighbors–connecting intentionally, compassionately, and regularly with the people around you–Hankins suggests starting with a list. “Think about everybody you interact with: friends, neighbors, co-workers. Write their names on a list. Put it somewhere where you see it regularly and just pray for them.”
But don’t stop there. Ask friends for help.
“I think accountability is going to help. If you’ve got some Christian friends around you, just going to them saying, ‘I think the Lord might be calling me to step up my game in terms of loving my neighbors, could you just pray with me and bring it up once a month and just hold me accountable to this?’”
Hankins believes that not only will God show you who to love, He may overwhelm you with opportunities. “He’s going to bring us probably more than we can handle, but He can handle it. And so, we’ll get to love those people well.”
You can read Doug Hankins’s article “Benefits of Being a Good Neighbor” from The Gospel Coalition website here.
(TGC also published his first-person account of being at the “Asbury Awakening“, the college-centered revival which happened in 2023.)
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